The present invention relates to an information recording medium and a method for recording and reproducing information on a recording medium suitable for digitally recording a continuous signal such as an audio signal.
When a sound signal is recorded on a recording medium such as an optical disk or the like, the sound signal to be recorded is sampled at a predetermined frequency and the sampled analog signal is converted to digital form. The digital signal is loaded into a memory. Generally, a pair of memories are provided so that data can be written into one of the memories while data is being simultaneously read out of the other memory and recorded on the medium. That is, the digital signal to be recorded is divided into blocks corresponding to the size of the memories, and the digital information is recorded on the recording medium block by block.
For example, assuming a sampling frequency of 15 kHz, a number of quantizing bits of 10, a compressed data length of eight bits, and a capacity of each memory of 256 kilobytes, the time required to store one block of the digitized sound signal data in one memory is about eight seconds ((256.times.10.sup.3 .times.8)/(15.times.10.sup.3 .times.8.times.2)) in a two-channel (right and left channels) stereophonic mode.
In this system, it often occurs that there is a blank area of one to seven seconds in the final block of data recorded on the disk. It has been impossible during reproduction with conventional systems to terminate the reproducing process prior to the end of the reproduction of this blank area. That is, it has conventionally been impossible to reproduce another musical selection or the like until the reproduction of this blank area of one to seven seconds has been completed.